Franka was founded in 1909, and was absorbed by Wirgin in 1962. Wirgin went under during the 1970s. Photo by Murilee Martin

I did some research, then hit eBay and found a solid-looking, Bayreuth-built Franka Bonafix camera, seemingly of late-1930s vintage, for $15. It's a fairly typical folding camera of its era, solidly built but without any fancy features, and production of the Bonafix continued into the early 1950s. This one needed a cleaning and a few minor repairs, and then it was ready to visit a couple of Denver wrecking yards.

The Bonafix has a removable insert that allows it to shoot two small photographs instead of one large one. Here's a half-frame shot. Photo by Murilee Martin

This camera is set up to shoot either full 6x9cm images (about the size of a playing card) or half-frame 4.5x6cm images, via the use of a removable metal adapter and double film-counter windows. This means you can get 16 photos out of a roll of 120 film, instead of the usual eight; this design was very popular during the pfennig-pinching Great Depression. I already had a Falcon Miniature camera, which gets half-frame images on smaller 127 film, from the same era, so I was familiar with the half-frame concept. First, I took the Bonafix to a Denver-area wrecking yard with the half-frame adapter in place, getting some nice but not-so-sharp images with it.

The full-frame images, being twice as large, look sharper. Photo by Murilee Martin

Then I removed the half-frame adapter from the camera and brought it to a different wrecking yard. There's some haze on the lens, but overall the Bonafix does a good job capturing junkyard ambience.

As a bonus, I'm including a few color shots taken with the MOCKBA-2 camera, a 1940s Soviet clone of a 1930s Zeiss Super Ikonta. Photo by Murilee Martin

At the end of the gallery, you'll find a trio of color junkyard photos shot with the Soviet Zeiss copy in California.